Twenty-four years remind the tears of my eyes.
(Bury the dead for fear that they walk to the grave in labour.)
In the groin of the natural doorway I crouched like a tailor
Sewing a shroud for a journey
By the light of the meat-eating sun.
Dressed to die, the sensual strut begun,
With my red veins full of money,
In the final direction of the elementary town
I advance as long as forever is.

A stranger has come
To share my room in the house not right in the head,
                    A girl mad as birds

Bolting the night of the door with her arm her plume.
                    Strait in the mazed bed
She deludes the heaven-proof house with entering clouds

Yet she deludes with walking the nightmarish room,
                    At large as the dead,
Or rides the imagined oceans of the male wards.

                    She has come possessed
Who admits the delusive light through the bouncing wall,
                    Possessed by the skies

She sleeps in the narrow trough yet she walks the dust
                    Yet raves at her will
On the madhouse boards worn thin by my walking tears.

And taken by light in her arms at long and dear last
                    I may without fail
Suffer the first vision that set fire to the stars.

were i to eat the sun
and let its pulp trickle down my throat—
would i glow through the skin
like gods do
in their upstairs rooms?
would they pull a chair for me?
would they look me in the face
or through it?

what is it,
to have no one above
but still feel pressed from the top down?
the halls breathe.
the windows widen.
my mind reached the edge of space
and left static in the vents.
it drips from the ceiling
in the shape of warnings.

i drift through the folds
of my boxmind—
no doors, no exits,
just pill bottles echoing in reverse.
the corners hum in borrowed voices.
my tongue collapses
like paper soaked in antiseptic.

it’s always like this
when the antipsychotics dissolve
before i do:

time frays,
gravity peels,
and i wake up
inside-out.

I remember as you stood bare feet
tiptoes on the red linoleum

reaching up to pull
the shade at dusk;

I left before the sun rose
you slept weeks

before realizing
there was no return.

Mothers are drowning their
children and piercing
hearts with nails
because they
fear ISIS

and Jordanian
military will
eventually
slaughter
them like

goats.

When the morning was waking over the war
He put on his clothes and stepped out and he died,
The locks yawned loose and a blast blew them wide,
He dropped where he loved on the burst pavement stone
And the funeral grains of the slaughtered floor.
Tell his street on its back he stopped a sun
And the craters of his eyes grew springshots and fire
When all the keys shot from the locks, and rang.
Dig no more for the chains of his grey-haired heart.
The heavenly ambulance drawn by a wound
Assembling waits for the *****'s ring on the cage.
O keep his bones away from the common cart,
The morning is flying on the wings of his age
And a hundred storks perch on the sun's right hand.

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on that sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

no tree to adorn with glitter and gold
no christmas stories will be told
no stockings hung over the fireplace
no garland strung up on the staircase
fewer faces to greet at the door
fewer *** and eggnogs to pour
christmas music won't be playing
family members won't be staying
this year, christmas will be blue
because this year, we won't have you